Archive for the ‘Terrorist Attack’ Category

As national security adviser in the Bush White House, Condoleezza Rice verbally OK’d the CIA’s request to subject top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002.

WASHINGTON — As national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA’s request to subject high-ranking Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, the earliest known decision by a Bush administration official to OK use of the simulated drowning technique.

Rice’s role was detailed in a narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It provides the most detailed timeline yet for how the CIA’s harsh interrogation program was conceived and approved at the highest levels in the Bush White House.

The new timeline shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The narrative also shows that dissenting legal views about the severe interrogation methods were brushed aside repeatedly.

The Intelligence Committee’s timeline comes a day after the Senate Armed Services Committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the CIA’s harsh interrogation program and abuses of prisoners at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Both revelations follow President Barack Obama’s release of internal Bush administration legal memos that justified the use of severe methods by the CIA, a move that kicked up a firestorm from opposing sides of the ideological spectrum.

According to the new narrative, which compiles legal advice provided by the Bush administration to the CIA, Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah, a so-called high-value detainee, to then-CIA Director George Tenet in July 2002.

Last fall, Rice acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed and asked for the attorney general to conduct a legal review. She said she did not recall details. Rice omitted her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee.

A spokesman for Rice declined comment when reached Wednesday.

Days after Rice gave Tenet the nod, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a top secret Aug. 1 memo. Zubaydah underwent waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002.

In the years that followed, according to the narrative issued Wednesday, there were numerous internal legal reviews of the program, suggesting government attorneys raised concerns that the harsh methods, particularly waterboarding, might violate federal laws against torture and the U.S. Constitution.

But Bush administration lawyers continued to validate the program. The CIA voluntarily dropped the use of waterboarding, which has a long history as a torture tactic, from its arsenal of techniques after 2005.

According to the two Senate reports, CIA lawyers first presented the plan to waterboard Zubaydah to White House lawyers in April 2002, a few weeks after he was taken into custody in 2002 in a Pakistani safe house.

Tenet wrote in his memoir that CIA officers themselves originated the idea.

In May 2002, Rice, along with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales met at the White House with the CIA to discuss the use of waterboarding.

The Armed Services Committee report says that six months earlier, in December 2001, the Pentagon’s legal office already had made inquiries about the use of mock interrogation and detention tactics to a U.S. military training unit that schools armed forces personnel in how to endure harsh treatment. A former intelligence official said Wednesday the CIA officers also based their proposed harsh interrogations on the mock interrogation methods used by the unit.

He declined to be identified because the CIA had not authorized the disclosure of the information.
In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel’s office, officials at the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, detailed their methods for the Pentagon. The list included waterboarding.

But the training unit warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”

“A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” the training officials said in their memo.

Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. The memos appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data provided to the Pentagon to show that the CIA’s methods would not cross the line into torture.

The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government’s carefully controlled training program.

Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods were inherently dangerous and students were sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.

“The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially,” he said.

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers.

Last week, the Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, privately told intelligence employees that “high value information” was obtained through the harsh interrogation techniques. However, on Tuesday, in a written statement, Blair said, “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.”

No worries. Jihad in America — pah! Obama is President! Probably this thing was left behind by a member of the Tamil Tigers on vacation. “‘Suicide Bomber-Type’ Vest Found In Mt. Washington,” from WPXI, April 2 (thanks to all who sent this in):

MOUNT WASHINGTON, Pa. — Workers cleaning out a house in Mt. Washington called police when they found a device with what looked like pipe bombs with wires and nails attached.”It looked exactly like somebody would wear in a suicide bomber-type of scene or suicide bomber- type of incident,” said Sheldon Williams, of the Pittsburgh police bomb squad.

The device was found outside 559 Southern Avenue late Thursday morning while workers from Pittsburgh Iron and Scrap Metal were picking up scrap metal. While loading materials into their truck, they noticed a device and called authorities.

The Obama administration is taking steps quietly to shut down the program that qualifies commercial airline pilots to carry firearms in jetliner cockpits in order to ward off another 9/11-type attack.

The administration recently diverted $2 million from a program to train and certify pilots to carry firearms safely while on duty. Instead, it is using the money to hire additional field inspectors to help discipline pilots who step out of line, according to a report in Tuesday’s Washington Times.

A Times editorial condemned the Obama administration’s action, calling it “completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots.”

Since Obama took office, the approval process for certifying pilots to carry firearms has ground to a halt, the newspaper reports. Pilots are afraid to speak out about the behind-the-scenes maneuverings, for fear of retaliation, according to the newspaper. No cases have been reported in which pilots have brandished a weapon inappropriately or otherwise abused their eligibility to carry firearms.

About 12,000 pilots have been authorized to carry handguns while flying aircraft as part of the Federal Flight Deck Officers Program. Congress authorized the program in a 310-to-113 vote following the 9/11 attacks to help prevent terrorists from turning jetliners into flying bombs that could be used to attack key sites like the White House, the Pentagon, or Capitol Hill.

Paul Valone, a Second Amendment advocate who directs Grass Roots North Carolina (GRNC.org), is calling for citizens to contract their congressional representatives to protest the administration’s anti-gun priorities.

Pilots are already required to pay for their own room and board during training, and use paid leave for the time they’re off the job. Every six months, the program requires them to be requalified for firearm use.

Valone writes on Examiner.com: “While bureaucrats . . . may have attempted to hamstring the program with burdensome requirements, training instructors and the Federal Air Marshals who now oversee the program routinely thank the FFDOs for their professionalism and dedication in protecting the nation’s air commerce against terrorism.”

Valone says the Obama administration is “dismantling yet another layer of defense against terrorism and defying the will of the American people.”

Since coming to power, the Obama administration has undertaken a series of moves that signal a major de-emphasis of programs enacted to keep America’s homeland safe from terrorist attack:

A coming episode of the acclaimed FX drama “Rescue Me” will tackle what may sound like a far-fetched plot line: that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job.” The actor who espouses the theories on camera, it turns out, also subscribes to them in real life.

Claims that Al Qaeda terrorists were not solely responsible for the attacks have a lively following on the Internet, including on YouTube, but the second episode of “Rescue Me’s” fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company (FX is operated by the News Corporation).

“They’re not discussed a lot in the press,” Daniel Sunjata, the actor who plays Franco Rivera on “Rescue Me,” told reporters at a television press tour last month. He predicted that the episode would be “socio-politically provocative.”

In the episode, Mr. Sunjata’s character delivers a two-minute monologue for a French journalist describing a “neoconservative government effort” to control the world’s oil, drastically increase military spending and “change the definition of pre-emptive attack.” To put it into action, he continues, “what you need is a new Pearl Harbor. That’s what they said they needed.”

Mr. Sunjata surprised some of the TV reporters when he said that he “absolutely, 100 percent” supports the assertion that “9/11 was an inside job.”

The alternative theories “seem to me to make a lot more sense than the ones that are popularly espoused,” he said, calling it admirable that the conversation was allowed within “Rescue Me.”

Peter Tolan, an executive producer, said Mr. Sunjata is “well read” and has “done a lot of research.”

“Look, obviously not all of us buy in,” he told reporters. “But we went: ‘Wow, that’s interesting, and he’s passionate about it. Let’s use that.’ ”

Sept. 11 has been a touchstone for the series, which is set in a New York City firehouse. Denis Leary, who plays the lead character, said Mr. Sunjata’s character creates a rift among the fictional firefighters. Similar scenes have played out in actual firehouses in New York, he said, “where some of the younger members don’t even have to completely buy into the theory of 9/11 being an inside job, but want to discuss it.”BRIAN STELTER

1. Al Qaeda: “It is the organization that has the capacity to most threaten the physical safety of America and Americans. So it remains job No. 1. And we have talked about some successes and so on, but it is resilient, and therefore we have to continue to keep an eye on Al Qaeda,” he said.

2. Violence in Mexico: “Our good friend and neighbor Mexico had this horrible surge in violence that may cause — in fact has caused — us to talk with our Mexican friends, in more meaningful and deeper ways, to discover ways that we can cooperate against what we now view to be, and has always been, a common problem. …

“What you’ve got is President Calderon, very heroically, taking on drug cartels that I think everyone agrees threaten certainly the well-being of the Mexican people and the Mexican state, and taking them on in a very, very progressive way. Now, it is not quite the same thing as Colombia, where you had a politically motivated movement, the FARC, merging with narcotics organizations. Here it is largely in the business of crime but the effects could be just as dangerous, certainly to the well-being of the Mexican people.”

3. Iran’s nuclear program: “I included Iran, in terms of as they move forward in their own decision-making process, as they continue to churn out LEU, low enriched uranium, they do it at great cost, diplomatically and economically with regard to sanctions. They seem to be doing it with a purpose. As that quantity of that stockpile grows, you would think that at some point in that process, they are going to have to make a decision as to what it is they are going to do with it. So that is something we have to keep a close eye on as well.”